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"[Science fiction is] nightmares and visions, always outlined by the barely possible."
- Gregory Benford
 |
| Black Hole | ||
| A massive space object that emits no light. |
As far as I know, this is the first use of the phrase "black hole" in the sense that we now use it in science fiction. There is at least one use of the idea of a black hole avant la lettre that comes before this story.
In the story, an airplane encounters an amazing phenomenon - a rift in space! They go through the rift, and then fate throws them an Einsteinian curve ball - they arrive at the other end of space!
| “There’s something in the sky out there! Something dead ahead, that’s between us and that constellation!”
“There can’t be anybody out there,” protested Fowler, wrinkling his forehead like a bewildered child. “If there were, a small planet or asteroid, it would shine, at least a little, in reflected starlight.”
 ('Rift in Infinity' by Ernst) ...A huge, full circle of the sky before them was a circle of blackness, with no stars showing. It was as though a great plate were being held up before the T-12. Only you couldn’t see the plate... ...“All right,” snapped Gates, “soar up here till you run out of gas and crash anyway. For that thing has gravity force. Already we weigh more. There’s enough gravity pull to smash us as thoroughly as if we crashed from a hundred miles up on Earth.” ...The round black hole in the star studded sky was growing rapidly more all-engulfing, indicating that, whatever celestial body it was they approached, it was quite small. All the sky ahead of them— or under them, if one would choose to state it that way — was now a black and starless void. But still the blackness looked more like a hole than a solid. “Maybe the thing’s like a big cup, and we’re going down into it,” said Enright dubiously. “Hardly,” said Boehm. “Any substance turning free in space is bound to assume a spherical shape.” “We don’t know that. It’s only a theory — ” |
| Technovelgy from Rift in Space,
by Paul Ernst. Published by Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1937 Additional resources -
|
However, the explorers succeed in landing on the black planet!
There was the plane, bathed in illumination. There were the solid-looking beams from the floodlights, like short legs on which the T-12 rested. And then there was nothing.
“The planet’s invisible,” said Enright.
“No,” said Fowler. “If it were invisible, we could see through it, see the stars on the other side. The substance of which it is composed is completely nonreflecting, that’s all.”
What happens when they try to take off?
“What the devil are you doing now?” Gates jerked out.
“Figuring the plane’s chances of pulling away from the planet’s gravitational force,” said Fowler. “It can’t be done. I can prove mathematically that we’ll never win clear.”
“I should think that the fact that a plane can leave groimd at all, where the pull is strongest, would prove that it could keep on going up as long as its fuel supply held out and there was atmosphere thick enough to hold it,” growled Gates. “But then I’m no higher mathematician.”
It was as though the plane rested on dull black glass, which reflected no pinpoint of light, and into which the eye could penetrate until vision was lost- in nothingness.
Fowler was covering a page with mathematical symbols.
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'He found a barber shop which, he thought, would be good for an idle hour.'
'Thirty rounds of fighting is tough work. Even for machines.'
'...the excavations were already in progress, for he saw gray slopes of rubble.'
'...the walking mills of Puffy Products began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas.'
'Here is a Clerk that would work incessantly, and neither eat, sleep, want payment, or grumble.'
'ZARNAK, YOU'RE TO COMMAND A SCOUTING EXPEDITION --- FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT!'
'These are your rudimentary seed packages... Some will combine in place to form more complicated structures.'
